At long last, we are happy to announce the launch of the OpenAcademic project. This project is dedicated to integrating Elgg, Drupal, Moodle, and Mediawiki. All code developed under this project will be released back to the respective communities under an open source license, and it will be freely available to download and distribute.

Yeah. We’re silly like that.

This project arose from a series of online discussions about Elgg, Drupal, and Moodle, and how these tools fit in an educational setting. As we continued to talk about these tools, we all saw the opportunity to create a better online learning environment — a learning space that incorporated informal learning alongside a more formal course structure, and that drew from the strength of the community-building software already built by the open source community.

Over the next few days and weeks, we will be talking more about our plans and vision for the integration. In general terms, the integration will start with single sign on between sites, and the ability to move content seamlessly between sites. The integration will also include the ability to search across sites, and to aggregate tags across sites. As the integration develops, these tools have the potential to create a truly distributed network of learners.

This integration, and this site, are very much works in progress. As I mentioned above, we will be writing about our precise vision for the initial integration. As we develop code, we plan to release it as early and as often as possible. We want people to use it, and to give us feedback, and to get involved in the process. Towards that end, we will be launching a developer site shortly — a site where developers can find information on how to get involved, meet other coders working on the project, and share code back. Look to this space for an announcement about when the developer site goes live. In the meantime, if you want to help out with the code, or talk to us about development for your institution, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Currently, the project is moving forward on a few fronts. We have been focusing on single sign on, as we see that as a central piece of functionality. Work is underway on building out Elgg as the front end for an OpenID server, and Moodle integration of OpenID has also begun. Drupal is also OpenID enabled, and there is an OpenID plugin in the Mediawiki svn repository. We have also looked at a few possibilities for searching across multiple sites, and for aggregating tags across sites. One of the items on Elgg’s long term roadmap is the ability to search user profiles and maintain friends across different Elgg installs, and some initial work on that has also been completed.

So, here’s to the beginning of something fun.

Cheers,

The OpenAcademic team

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 11:05 am and is filed under general, elgg, drupal, moodle, openid, integration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.